Harnessing the Power of​ People, Places & Communities

I'm thinking there are four main sectors in our socio-economic systemGovernmentBusiness and corporationsCommunity - that's sport and recreation; arts and heritage; and health and social services.Households - tenancies of which there many more now; home owners and investors.

I am sadly old enough now to have noticed a very distinct pattern in the days since I first voted - that was 1971 or thereabouts. I acknowledge this is a simplistic way to frame it, yet I still can't help but to continually observe it. When there is a national led government, there is continual spending on the Think Big, Muldoon style activities - sure infrastructure is important, but not at the expense of lots of other things.

There is continual erosion of government services and there is the subsequent impact on the community. All of this gets right down to household level and that's where the inequality has developed significantly. In the 1990's we had exactly this. Continual erosion of government services, restructure after restructure which has massive impacts on employment, and then the subsequent demise of the community sector (except for guess what - sport and recreation.

​National and also local governments continually invest in the infrastructure to build, build, build. They forget how much it takes to maintain the people to run them and the resources to maintain them. So now after nearly 9 years of this government, we have continued and growing inequality - all based on the same pattern of activity. They call it neo-liberalism, and the market forces. Guess what and who has grown the most out of all of this..... business/corporations. I'm now believing that actually this government want to privatise nearly everything they possibly can, which erodes .....democracy. So we are pleased to announce that less than 50% are actually voting. Let's just make Council a Board and call it a day!